‘… attempted murder of film star Laura Erskine …’
His fingers skidded down the soft, moist clay. Attempted murder?
He wiped his hands automatically on a damp cloth, intent on what the announcer was saying.
‘Film director Sebastian Ferrese is helping police with their enquiries …’
Nico could hardly believe his ear. They’d arrested Sebastian. He picked up his mobile phone and rang the hospital, but the operator told him curtly that Laura had only just left the operating theatre. There was no news yet.
‘How badly hurt was she? Is she going to survive?’
‘We cannot give any further information,’ he was told, before the operator cut him off.
In her private sitting room Vittoria d’Angeli saw the same news broadcast, her plump hands laid on her black-skirted lap, small feet planted close together, stiff-backed, bolt upright, on a shabby, faded, but still elegant eighteenth-century cream brocade sofa, whose design made it impossible to slouch.
The newscaster hadn’t said the girl was likely to die.
She must. Vittoria’s fingers clenched. She couldn’t bear to have her under the roof for even one night, sleeping in that room, with him … their moans of pleasure, of echoes the same sighs and groans, the smooth flesh sliding together, thigh on thigh, rising and falling, those sounds …
She bit the fleshy mound of her thumb. Everything came back, like the dead on the Day of Judgement, the drowned faces floating up from the dark waters of Venice, green and white …
Green eyes, cloudy red hair, that full, sensual mouth, the white skin … reminding her of what she longed to forget. Was there never any peace?
The police had been quick, arresting him. How had they done it so soon? And on what evidence? Of course, they had a reputation at stake. Murder was rare in Venice. Venetians were proud of their city being called the safest in Italy – and it probably was, for all sorts of reasons. Surrounded by water, and without any roads, it was hard for criminals to make a fast getaway, and the local population knew each other too well for anyone to get away with crime for long. The city was full of eyes and ears, awash with gossip.
Vittoria had had to learn to live with gossip, to accept that people she scarcely recognised, or might never even have met, knew her private life as intimately as she did – better, at first, because she had been naïve. She hadn’t guessed, suspected, understood anything. When you’re young you can be deceived by surfaces; you believe what you see.
It had been one of the gossiping, treacherous friends of the d’Angeli family who had told her – one of the worst moments of her life. She had sat there smiling, while inside she ripped apart. She had wanted to die of pain and humiliation. For a time, she had thought of throwing herself into the Grand Canal from one of the upper windows of Ca’ d’Angeli, as others had down the centuries. But she was made of tougher stuff. She had learnt to survive however hard the struggle, to plan however remote the future seemed, and Vittoria had vowed calmly to take revenge. One day she would make them pay.
And she had. In the end. She had been the victor at last, no longer the victim. She had had to wait, but she had learnt patience and tenacity as a child. That was why the Jesuits had said, ‘Give us a child until it is seven and it is ours for life.’
Milan, 1945
She had been just in her teens when her mother took her back to Milan. She hadn’t wanted to go and had cried bitterly at parting from Aunt Maria and Rosa.
‘You’re going home, you’ll be happier, now,’ Aunt Maria had said, trying to look cheerful in spite of the tears in her tired old eyes. Vittoria had wanted to believe her, but she knew nothing was as it had been before she went to Venice. Three of her half-brothers were gone, so was Papa. Life would be different at home, and in Venice she had been happier than she had ever been in Milan before the war. She couldn’t even remember Milan – it was all so long ago and far away.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she had sobbed.
‘You must,’ Aunt Maria said, patting her heaving back. ‘We’ll miss you. The house will be so quiet, without you running up and down the stairs, chattering to Gina and Olivia. But your mother needs you at home now and you must go.’
They returned to Milan in Frederick Canfield’s Jeep. Squashed into the back with the luggage, Vittoria had pretended to sleep, but from under her eyelashes she had silently observed her mother and the Englishman. They talked quietly to each other, looked at each other and smiled, the intimacy between them evident even to a girl of thirteen. Vittoria could never remember her mother looking at her father that way.
Had Mamma ever loved Papa? Had her father loved her mother? She had seen him kissing her, putting his arm round her, as if he did, but if he loved Mamma why had he done … that to her nurse?
They had left Venice at first light, but it was dark by the time they reached Milan, and Vittoria was genuinely fast asleep as the Jeep pulled up. Drowsily she stirred and her eyes opened. Disorientated, she stared out at lighted windows, at a shadowy building that rose up very high.
Frederick Canfield got out and began to unload the luggage. Her mother whispered to him, ‘Stay the night. There are plenty of empty rooms.’
‘No, I have too much to do tomorrow,’ he said, just as Carlo came out to welcome them.
Vittoria stumbled out on to the gravel driveway.
Carlo stopped dead. ‘My God, are you Vittoria? Last time I saw you you were just a baby.’
‘You’ve changed too. You look—’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, not knowing how to say what she was thinking.
Last time she had seen him he had been a slumped body in a wheelchair. A man like a sack, except for the arms that had developed great muscles from having to propel the wheelchair. Since then he had taught himself to walk using two sticks, swinging along on them at an amazing speed, his lean, wiry body seeming weightless between them.
He had lost so much weight that he looked taller and younger, his arms, shoulders, chest powerful. His thick black hair and black eyes reminded her of her father, but Carlo was better-looking, with a determined, tenacious air about him. Pain had etched itself into his face; his eyes burned with it. He had been to hell and back, and it showed.
Her mother had already told her how brilliantly Carlo ran the company. He was, Mamma said, a better businessman than their father had been, perhaps because he had suffered so much, had had to learn to adapt and to cope with whatever life threw at him.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, grinning suddenly. ‘Life’s been hard, these past few years, but it’s going to get better now.’
‘Oh, I hope so! It can’t get worse.’
He crossed himself. ‘Don’t say that! It’s tempting God.’ He had not always been so religious – perhaps that was something else the war had taught him.
Mamma said, plaintively, ‘Why are we standing around out here in this cold wind?’
‘Of course,’ Carlo said hastily, ‘come inside. You missed dinner, but it won’t take ten minutes to throw some supper together. There’s minestrone, and you can have pasta and tomato sauce. Our new cook’s food is pretty basic, but it’s always eatable.’
‘I’m starving,’ Vittoria confessed, and followed him, as a thin, black-haired young man came out to take the luggage into the house.
‘This is Antonio. He was in the army until a few months ago and now he’s working for us,’ Carlo told her. The young man gave her a faint bow and a brief glance from slanting eyes like wet liquorice.
Vittoria smiled at him. ‘Hallo,’ she said shyly, noticing that the white shirt he was wearing was far too big for him. Suddenly it occurred to her that it had belonged to her father: she could see it was well tailored, still in good condition, way beyond a servant’s means. It hung on his skinny shoulders and ballooned as he stretched to pick up the cases.
She wondered if Carlo, too, was wearing her father’s clothes. That shirt fitted him, but the quality of the material was so good that it couldn’t have bee
n bought lately. You simply couldn’t get shirts made of such cloth, so generously cut. Everything was skimped, of poor fabric and hard to come by. Well, it had been in Venice. Perhaps Milan was better off.
A little later, they sat down to supper in the high-ceilinged kitchen, by candlelight, a mean little fire in the hearth. As they ate the thick minestrone, Carlo told Vittoria at length about his plans for a new, even more magnificent house to replace the home that had been destroyed in the bombing.
She looked around the shadowy room at the copper pans hanging on the walls, the closed wooden shutters on the windows, the huge fireplace that gave out so little heat.
‘Mamma said you were renting this place?’
‘Yes, it’s convenient, close to the factory. A rambling old place, I know. It has fourteen bedrooms! The owners fled in ‘thirty-nine to live in Switzerland with their banker son in Geneva. Dirty cowards!’
The contempt in his voice made Vittoria jump.
‘As you’ll see in the morning, most of the houses around here were destroyed in the English bombing raids. This one wasn’t touched. Some people think the English left it alone because the Escali family were spies. It’s a strange coincidence otherwise.’
‘Was much saved from our old home?’ Vittoria asked.
‘Most of the furniture was smashed, but we rescued a few things. We had to move fast to get them out before the looters arrived. As if being bombed out of your home wasn’t bad enough! We had to contend with ghouls searching the ruins for anything worth having. I shot one bastard I caught trying to make off with an armful of Papa’s clothes.’ He gestured at himself. ‘I’m wearing one of the things he was trying to steal.’
‘Did you kill him?’ she whispered.
‘A bullet right through the heart,’ he told her grimly.
‘What did the police do to you?’
‘The police?’ He laughed shortly. ‘They shot looters if they caught them – they had to. Milan was overrun with them then, living in the ruins of houses like rats living in the sewers. They stole, killed, raped. Mostly they were army deserters, armed and dangerous. This was a terrified city in those last months of the war.’
That first evening, Vittoria was low-spirited. She would miss the sound and gleam of water all around her, not to mention her friends, Gina and Olivia, and the nuns at the convent school. That night she dreamt about Venice, and the dark little house off the Frezzeria, and cried in her sleep. It was to be months before she stopped dreaming of Venice, and for days she felt lost in the wandering corridors and high-ceilinged rooms of her new home.
That first evening, Carlo had told her he was about to get married; Vittoria had been brought back to be a bridesmaid.
‘You and I, we’re the only ones left,’ he said heavily, and she nodded. It was so long since she had seen the others that she had nearly forgotten what they had looked like.
His face lifted a little. ‘Rachele is only going to have you as a bridesmaid because, of course, she’s been married before. She doesn’t want the wedding to be too formal, this second time.’
Carlo’s bride was no blushing young virgin. He had chosen the widow of Captain Lensoni, his platoon commander, who had saved his life in Africa only to die later of his own wounds.
Rachele Lensoni, was nearly forty, a sultry creature, charged with frustration and passion, raven-haired, olive-skinned, ripe-breasted and broad-hipped. She was built to be the mother of a large family, but her only child had died during the worst months of the war. Half starved, weak, the little boy had contracted pneumonia in the winter of 1942. There had been no medicines available for the civilian population then; in desperation Rachele had come to Carlo for help, although they had never met. But he had written to offer his condolences after the death of her husband, and Rachele knew that he manufactured drugs. He had given her what she needed, but her son had died anyway. The medicine had come too late for him.
‘That’s how they met,’ Anna told Vittoria next morning, after Carlo had left for the factory and they were eating breakfast together; black coffee and hot rolls with home-made black cherry jam. Food was still scarce, and people ate sparingly even now. ‘Carlo offered her a job in the office and soon he was taking her out to dinner and bringing her home. I could see how the wind was blowing. It was time he married, anyway, and I like her, I must say. She’ll be good for Carlo.’
‘But she’s so old. Could she still have children? I’d have thought Carlo would want them.’
‘Oh, I think she has a few years yet!’ Anna said, laughing. ‘Forty isn’t that old, darling.’
Her bright eyes reminded Vittoria that her mother wasn’t forty yet. Was she going to marry the Englishman? Her stomach lurched.
Thoughtfully, Anna went on, ‘The question mark is over Carlo’s capacity, not Rachele’s. He told me he’s talked to his doctors and they say he could father a child.’ But she looked doubtful. ‘Let’s hope they’re right, for Rachele’s sake. I don’t think Carlo will care much, either way, or he would have married long ago. But Rachele is desperate to have another child.’
Vittoria burst out, ‘Mamma, are you going to marry the Englishman?’
There was a silence. Then Anna said flatly, ‘He’s married already, Vittoria. He got married while he was in England training for the work he is doing.’
Vittoria could scarcely breathe in her relief. She swallowed and cleared her throat before asking, ‘What work is he doing?’
‘Translating, assessing the situation here in Italy …’
‘Spying,’ Vittoria thought aloud. ‘Papa was right. He’s a spy – he was always a spy.’
Mamma looked angry. ‘No, that isn’t true! He wasn’t spying – he isn’t now. You don’t understand. Spying is one thing, intelligence work is another. He knows our country so he can see just how much it has changed since the war started and he can advise on what help we need – we do need help, Vittoria. We’re in a mess, brother fighting brother, Communists fighting Fascists. The hills are full of people who are still at war, hiding out there. Freddy knows so many people, he can find out what Italy needs if it is ever to recover. He’s liaising with the Americans, too. They’re the ones with the money and they will help us far more than the British can. I think Britain will be in a pretty bad way, too, after these terrible years of war.’
Vittoria had lost interest in what her mother was saying. Her mind was working along other lines. ‘Is his wife back home in England?’
Mamma sighed. ‘Of course. Where else would she be? They have a child, a little boy, two years old. His mother worked for the army before he was born. She was driving Freddy while he was working in London – that’s how they met – but she had to give up her job to take care of the baby.’
‘And he will go back to them? To England?’
Her mother nodded without speaking.
‘Soon?’ Vittoria insisted.
She got a weary, impatient look. Her mother did not want to think about Canfield going back to England.
‘Why do you keep harping on about it? One day he’ll be sent home, but until then he’s here.’ Here with her, her eyes said.
‘The war is over now, they’ll send him back home soon, I expect. He won’t be able to refuse, will he?’ Vittoria’s voice throbbed with satisfaction. She wasn’t going to pretend she liked him, even to comfort her mother.
Anna said sharply, ‘No, he can’t refuse to go. He’s in the army so he has to obey orders. We’re none of us free, Vittoria, you’ll understand that one day. Italy has lost the war. We can’t help ourselves so we have to accept what happens to us.’
‘We don’t have to accept anything!’ Vittoria bristled. ‘This is our country! We don’t have to let the Americans or the British tell us what to do!’
‘You’re too young to understand. We let Il Duce take us into that war, on the German side, and now we shall have to pay for losing. We need all our friends, like Freddy, now.’
‘He’s not my friend!’ Vittoria got up and
ran out of the kitchen. Canfield had taken her father’s place in her mother’s bed even though he was married and had a child of his own. She hated him. Sometimes she felt she hated her mother, yet she loved her, too. She was in such a muddle: she could never sort out what she really felt or why. She was like a piece of seaweed carried back and forth on the irresistible tide, torn from its roots, helpless, lost.
Carlo’s wedding was quite an event in Milan society. The austerity years were coming to an end, people were eager to have a party, dress up, enjoy themselves. It was so long since they had had any fun, but now the greyness of the war was past. Blue skies were back, hope, happiness; they had a future again.
There was no chance of Rachele getting a new wedding dress, so she wore her mother’s, which had been laid away in tissue paper in an attic in her family home. It had been rediscovered after her mother died in 1943 during an Allied bombing raid. Rachele had gone through the dead woman’s clothes. Nobody threw anything away during the war. Everything was potentially useful.
Old biscuit tins were used to keep food fresh, or to store needles and thread, old clothes were made into rag rugs or cut down for children. When Rachele found her mother’s heavy creamy satin wedding dress, she had sat in rapture for a long time, stroking it, feeling the weight, the beauty, the irreplaceable lustre of that marvellous material. It had been rewrapped in the crumpled, yellowed tissue paper in which it had been packed, then hidden again. Rachele couldn’t bring herself to cut it up or use it for anything else; nor could she bear to sell it.
It didn’t fit her, of course: her mother had been tiny, not above five foot, and as flat as a boy, while Rachele was very female with those full breasts, bigger waist and curvy hips. Luckily, the style of the period had meant that there was lots of spare fabric in the skirt. The seamstress had done a good job of inserting panels in the back and at the waist, to accommodate Rachele’s rounded body. Originally the dress had been designed to sweep the floor as the bride walked, but as Rachele was so much taller than her mother the hem ended just below her ankles, which was much more sensible, made it easier to walk up the aisle.
Deep and Silent Waters Page 23
